Italy.
Things had at last come to such a condition that it was not possible to
continue the Crusades without resorting to a taxation of the clergy, and
this was the true reason of the eventual lukewarmness, and even
opposition to them. But the stream of money that had thus been passing
into Italy had engendered habits of luxury and extravagance. Cost what
it might, money must be had in Rome. The perennial necessity under which
the kings of England and France found themselves--the necessity of
revenue for the carrying out of their temporal projects--could only be
satisfied in the same way. The wealth of those nations had insensibly
glided into the hands of the Church. [Sidenote: The King of England
compels the clergy to pay taxes.] In England, Edward I. enforced the
taxation of the clergy. They resisted at first, but that sovereign found
an ingenious and effectual remedy. He directed his judges to hear no
cause in which an ecclesiastic was a complainant, but to try every suit
brought against them; asserting that those who refused to share the
burdens of the state had no right to the protection of its laws. They
forthwith submitted. In the nature and efficacy of this remedy we for
the first time recognize the agency of a class of men soon to rise to
power--the lawyers.

[Sidenote: The King of France attempts it.] In France, Philip the Fair
made a similar attempt. It was not to be supposed that Rome would
tolerate this trespassing on what she considered her proper domain, and
accordingly Boniface issued the bull "_Clericis laicos_,"
excommunicating kings who should levy subsidies on ecclesiastics.
Hereupon Philip determined that, if the French clergy were not tributary
to him, France should not be tributary to the pope, and issued an edict
prohibiting the export of gold and silver from France without his
license. But he did not resort to these extreme measures until he had
tried others which perhaps he considered less troublesome. He had
plundered the Jews, confiscated their property, and expelled them from
his dominions. [Sidenote: Is abetted by the begging friars,] The Church
was fairly next in order; and, indeed, the mendicant friars of the lower
class, who, as we have seen, were disaffected by the publication of "The
Everlasting Gospel," were loud in their denunciations of her wealth,
attributing the prevailing religious demoralization to it. They pointed
to the example of our Lord and his disciples; and when their an